População em situação de rua e o uso de drogas: uma revisão de literatura

Abstract

Observing the increase of the homeless population and the limited knowledge about the relationship of drug use by this population and, furthermore, understanding that this is a complex social problem, the present study had, as a general objective, to carry out a review literature, in order to know the Brazilian scientific production on the subject and to evaluate the frequency with which studies with this theme were published, in the period from 2009 to 2019. As a methodology, a search for articles in the Virtual Health Library was used, considering the descriptors: homeless population, drug use by the homeless population and homeless people, with a return of more than 1,000 articles. A new filter was used, highlighting articles in Portuguese, with just over 300 articles obtained. In new filtering, using the expression “homeless and drug use”, 93 articles were obtained, where the content was observed, and it was found that living on the streets is not motivated or driven only by the problematic use of alcohol and other drugs, our initial thinking. We selected 48 (forty-eight) articles that could provide answers to our object of study: what are the conditioning factors for living on the streets and if there is influence of the use / abuse of alcohol and other drugs. As a result, there were some answers to the objectives expected from the present study, namely: who are these people, to know the reasons / reasons that led them to live on the streets, which drugs are most used and the frequency of articles on the proposed theme. The selected publications include ethnographic study, social research, qualitative research of the social / strategic type, cross-sectional study with a sample, exploratory / descriptive study, discursive analysis and analysis of newspaper texts.